Transanation
by farfetched4
Summary: Their's is perhaps not the strangest love story, yet it is far from normal. Hong Kong/Iceland, human AU


Warnings for mentions of bipolar depression and implied schizophrenia, but nothing major.

He smiles idly, looking up at the blue sky with glazed eyes, legs swinging over the small drop into the garden. He is leant back on his hands, sure to have an impact of the wooden deck on later, but right now, he's watching the clouds duel in their silent war across the sky. He observes purple and orange infuse with it, swirling into a mass of colourful battalions.

Even if he doesn't understand, it's good to watch. Nice to see. Even if it isn't there.

Because there's nothing beyond the black, so he doesn't bother looking.

Emil feels someone sit down beside him, and turns to face them, although it is futile. A patch of flowers grows from nothing.

"Hello."  
The person sighs. Emil decides that it's a male child.  
"Hey." He produces what he hopes is a smile - his brother taught him that, lifting both corners of his mouth. Apparently it's a friendly gesture.

"Will you tell me your name?" Unseen to Emil, the boy looks up at him and nods.  
"Li Xiao Chun. Or Leon. Whatever. What's yours?"

Emil keeps smiling, even through the image of a broken sink and a woman crying on the floor. He feels very little.

"Xiao. That sounds like a nice name." She collapses. He resists putting a hand out to steady her. She disappears. "I'm called Emil Steilsson. But Emil's fine. Or anything else. Will you tell me how you look?" He hears Xiao utter an confused 'huh?'. "I'm blind." An 'oh' follows it.

"Dark brown hair, medium length, brown eyes, Asian looking. Were you born without sight?" Emil shakes his head, trying to build up a picture of Xiao over a cityscape. A flock of pigeons fly over it. "That's a bit better. I'm bipolar."

"Ha?"  
"I thought everyone wanted to know why everyone else was in here?" Emil tilts his head. Water begins running out of the fountains, and people begin to panic, clinging to lampposts and such. He might have laughed, if he'd been normal.

"I don't care." Xiao smiles, though Emil doesn't see it. He does feel the hand placed over his own, and looks at it in a mockery of his own inability to see. The citizens all start discussing what caused the sudden tilt of the earth, before another flock of pigeons fly by and shatter the image into waves on the sea. He almost pouts: he could have had fun with that one.  
"Thank you. But I think you ought to know anyway." The hand is removed, Emil's vision staying black for once, no immediate image forthcoming. "Does it bother you that you can't see?"

Emil smiles lightly. Oh he sees, just not things that are visible to anyone else.  
"No. This way, I can't see the walls."

And in an asylum, it makes for quite a blessed existence.

* * *

He's watching atoms react when he hears the sobbing. For some reason, the management had decided to give people roommates. Emil had never had one before, apart from when he was very small and he slept in his brother's bed occasionally. Back when he could see the things deemed real. Though he was blind, he was somehow proficient at finding his way around, helped by the Braille dotted around the centre.

Letting the hydrogen atoms pair up and leave his view, Emil gingerly shifted himself off his bed and padded over to the other side of the room. If he'd had sight, he'd have observed Xiao with his hands pressed over his face, tears dripping onto an already sodden pillow. As it was, he could only hear the soft intakes of breath that came with it, and it was enough to decipher a general scene.

Emil grasped the cover and slipped in behind Xiao, wrapping his arms around the sobbing boy, drawing a gasp from him. His body tensed, but then soon relaxed again.

"I want to die." Emil caught the whisper over the colliding water and metal molecules.  
"What is it like to be sad?" Xiao shifted.  
"Have you never..?" Emil shook his head, the reaction starting again with vigour. "Like a gaping hole in my existence. Like it's sucking everything in. I'm nothing outside it."

"That's not fun." He heard Xiao laugh somewhat bitterly.  
"You're so weird!"

Well, that'd make two of them then.

* * *

On the good days, they held hands. On the bad ones, they gripped each other like lifelines. Even if no one could teach Emil to feel happy, he felt a ghost of it. He felt a glimmer of pain when Xiao cried, a shadow of a laugh when Xiao was happy.

And telling Xiao, the other boy had grinned, telling him it was enough.

There's no tally on their walls. Emil couldn't see one if it existed, and Xiao said it would make him feel bad. So they never kept one.

One morning, Emil woke up (he at least knew that distinction -in sleep he saw nothing) to feel somehow pinned down, and realised that Xiao was over him.

"What would you do if I kissed you?" It didn't take much thinking. He saw a worm writhe its way through damp earth, eating a pathway.  
"Kiss back?" He doesn't know how. Xiao doesn't either. But they kiss anyway, as well as a blind and an inexperienced pair could. Action completed, Xiao tucks himself into Emil's bed, curling up next to him.

"Would you come with me if I escaped?"  
Emil smiled at least half genuinely.  
"I'd follow you anywhere."

* * *

They don't escape. Emil listens to Xiao plan idly, but the Asian soon realises that the canteen keeps a tight grasp on their teaspoon stocks and gives up. It's not their time for a Great Escape. Where would they go, anyway? They know nothing of the world.

Sometimes Xiao gets anxious, paces around their room (it becomes a cell when he gets in this mood, the asylum a prison and conspiracy theories abound). Emil puts his hands over Xiao's eyes.

"Pretend it isn't there. It isn't. Are you scared?" Xiao whimpers quietly, so Emil presses his head into his shoulder, promises to keep the dark things away. "Think of rain. Think of nicely decorated cakes. Think of an apple tree. Don't think of sad. Think of me. I'll always be here for you, wherever you are, wherever you go." Emil strokes Xiao's hair, relishes the feel of human, peers at the hourglass being tipped up in a border of black. Xiao nods. Snaps out of it eventually, kisses Emil even though he doesn't know how.

"Would you marry me if we ever left?"

"Oh Xiao," he says. "I'd marry you even if I stayed here forever."

It is so.

* * *

They have no witnesses. Just a daisy chain ring that melts from his finger the day after, but so long as he has Xiao, it doesn't matter to Emil. A crowd of dancers tumble through the sky until he hugs Xiao, distractions fading to glorious black leaving him to imagine just how they look.

Happy. He settles on happy and it doesn't leave his mind.

Even with the occasional tech-tech-tech of guns peetering across his blacked out vision, a silent movie clip of someone falling down, pooling blood, he is happy. And with Xiao, he is even happier.

* * *

I hope you enjoyed it. Originally a fill at the Hetalia kink meme on livejournal, for nations in an asylum.


End file.
